Inter-Team Negotiation Support, Coalition Formation, and Negotiation Outcomes

This chapter is an attempt to investigate the role of negotiation support systems (NSS) in supporting inter-team negotiations, which have become commonplace for today’s business negotiations. Inter-team negotiations differ from simple dyadic negotiations, and are associated with enormous complexity introduced by the negotiating team dynamics. When there are three or more members in a negotiating team, coalition formation by team members stands out as an intriguing phenomenon, of which cultural diversity is a primary antecedent. NSS through altering coalition formation dynamics have important impacts on various negotiation outcomes. An experiment was conducted to test the authors’ research model and hypotheses. A content analysis was undertaken to measure the extent of coalition formation. Besides the quantitative approach, a qualitative analysis was also conducted to further enhance our exploratory efforts in examining the phenomenon. The results provide initial evidence of the usefulness of NSS in supporting inter-team negotiations, and have both theoretical and practical implications.

The Effect of Level of Negotiation Support Systems and Cultural Diversity on Coalition Formation

This article is an attempt to investigate the role of negotiation support systems (NSSs) in supporting inter-team negotiations, which have become commonplace for today’s business negotiations. Inter-team negotiations differ from simple dyadic negotiations, and are associated with enormous complexity introduced by the negotiating team dynamics. When there are three or more members in a negotiating team, coalition formation by team members stands out as an intriguing phenomenon, of which cultural diversity is a primary antecedent. NSSs through altering coalition formation dynamics have important impacts on various negotiation outcomes. An experiment was conducted to test our research model and hypotheses. A content analysis was undertaken to measure the extent of coalition formation. Besides the quantitative approach, a qualitative analysis was also conducted to further enhance our exploratory efforts in examining the phenomenon. The results provide initial evidence of the usefulness of NSSs in supporting inter-team negotiations and have both theoretical and practical implications.

The Effects of Media Richness on Multilateral Negotiations in a Collaborative Virtual Environment

Negotiations between three or more parties are more complex than dyadic negotiations concerning the integration of various interests. In this study, we investigated negotiation in a collaborative virtual environment. We focused specifically on communication channels and their impact on negotiation in three-person groups. Three conditions of media richness were varied in the collaborative virtual environment: text chat, audio channel, and a combination of both. Furthermore, various nonverbal signals and a function for taking notes were available to the participants in every condition. The results show that participants in the conditions with audio channel and with audio channel and text chat are more satisfied with the communication process and need less time to find a solution. The quality of the negotiated result does not differ between the conditions. Adding text chat to the audio channel does not enhance the potential of solving negotiation problems. Audio-based communication seems to meet the requirements of negotiating better than text chat in terms of a more satisfying and faster communication process.